In storage systems using erasure coded data protection, data is randomly spread across storage devices, typically hard disk drives. An incoming file or object is broken up into a number of pieces, i.e. the spread, and the pieces are written to a random selection of storage devices in the storage system. Erasure coded storage systems have a property defining how many pieces of the file or object can be lost yet the system still able to reconstruct the file or object from the remaining pieces not lost. Randomly selecting storage devices for writes benefits performance, but prevents the storage system from being able to use device power savings features as the storage devices in the storage system must remain powered up to prevent the long latency required to get storage devices, which may be utilizing these power saving features, back on-line and serving data. Therefore, there is a need to maximize power savings thus reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) of storage systems.